Beneath a Burning Sky (The Dawnhawk Trilogy Book 3) (46 page)

“I don’t even know why anyone bothers with those things,” he growled. “Has anyone ever hit anything with them? Even once?”

Lina backed away as the Revenants rose up between them. They groaned and rasped. A dead Bluecoat from the
Glory’
s crew reached out to her, bringing up her gorge as she ducked away.

“Captain Blackheart shot an ape once,” she said.

Oscar snorted. “She couldn’t miss!” A Revenant lurched his way, and he dodged it, sticking out a leg. The corpse tripped with a loud thump, and its groans turned strident and angry. “Natasha Blackheart is the worst shot on the Atalian Sea,” continued Oscar. “Decent with a blade but downright hazardous to everything around her with a firearm.”

Lina thought back to all the near misses that she’d had around the captain. Intentional or not, it seemed Captain Blackheart was always trying to kill someone. “That’s neither here nor there,” she said as she wove around behind an undead Nate Wiley. The Revenant looked past her, hunting for his brother, probably. Lina tried not to focus on how that made her feel. “Why are you doing this, Oscar? You’ve always been an absolute shit, but mutiny? Helping out the Perinese against the whole town?”

Oscar Pleasant snarled. He leaped past dead Nate Wiley, lashing out at her with his cutlass. She parried, feeling the shock of the blow run down her blade and up her arms. It forced her back and off-balance. Lina snarled, threw her weight back against the sword, and shoved it forward again. Her opponent bent to the side and let her go past as their blades slid against each other, sending sparks up to flash and die in the air between them.

“Why
I
did this?” asked Oscar. “I had no damned choice! You all left me behind! Months ago, when we threw Fengel and his bitch out on that deserted island. I got knocked cold when we attacked the
Kingfisher
, and you left me behind! It was the Perinese who picked me up, and they were going to hang me!”

Lina rounded on him. “You should have let them,” she panted, swinging for his knees. The cutlass was
heavy
.

Oscar danced back, then came forward with an overhand chop. Lina parried and leaned, letting his blow slide aside. A dead Bluecoat reached out for her—it seemed to remember her as an enemy. Lina ducked its outstretched arms and darted around behind it, appearing on the opposite side and lifting her blade up at Oscar.

The traitorous pirate parried her blow and shoved her back. Then he cursed as the Bluecoat reached for him. They separated, circling around, avoiding the Revenants excited by their fight.

“That’s a stupid weapon for you, girlie. If you keep swinging it around, you’re going to get tired.”

Lina tried to respond through her panting. The cutlass was heavy and big and not at all what she usually used. But it would serve. It would have to.

They came together again. She hacked out at him twice, which he parried aside before slugging her in the gut with his off hand. Her breath rushed out, and pain filled her belly. She barely pulled away as his own blade splintered into the wood of the hold at their feet.

Lina readied herself again, struggling for air. Something was wrong.
Why am I so tired?
The sword was big for her—but not that big.

“Getting tired yet?” mocked Oscar. A Bluecoat clambered to its feet in front of him and he shoved it contemptuously aside.

There was something in his voice. Lina narrowed her eyes. “What did you do?” she demanded.

Oscar laughed. He turned to face her, cutlass held lazily at his side. With his other hand he reached into his shirt. “Remember this?” he asked, pulling something up to dangle in the lantern light.

Lina stared. It was a long braid of golden hair, tied together at each end. Beads and charms dangled along its length. Even a year later, Lina still recognized the tresses that she’d cut away.

“You’ve still got my hair?” she said.

“Oh yes,” laughed Oscar. “Thought you’d recognize it. I kept it this whole time, waiting to teach you a lesson. Saved up my shares and took it to an aetherite down on Flophouse Terrace. You really shouldn’t have just
given
it away. That Salomcani sorcerer said that made it extra potent.”

“Salomcani...” Lina blinked. She stepped aside as a dead Jahmal lurched her way, one hand to a lethal chest wound, the other out for succor. “You mean Xavier Ravalan? You gave my hair to Xavier Ravalan to make a Worked charm? That fool isn’t even a real aetherite!”

Oscar rocked back. “Yes, he is!”

“No,” said Lina. “He’s not. He just wears a turban and talks in that ridiculous accent!” She panted, fighting for breath.

The deck of the cargo hold shifted abruptly. Lina jammed her cutlass into the planks beneath her feet and held on. All about her, the Revenants toppled. Even Allen went tumbling, clutching his arm and crying out in pain. A high-pitched ringing sounded somewhere outside past the bulkheads—the chains and cables restraining the Dray Engine were tearing apart.

The cargo deck rocked back the other way. Lina held on to the cutlass, trying not to fall. Something slammed into the hull beneath them—a dreadful, resounding impact that echoed about the space. Wood crunched and snapped; it was one of the most sinister things Lina had ever heard.

Amazingly, Oscar Pleasant still stood. He crouched around his sword, just as she did, and held the Worked braid of hair in his other hand. When the airship stilled again, he looked about, ratlike in the swaying light. His gaze fell again on her, and he stood with a wordless snarl.

“Liar,” he hissed. “I can see it. You’re tiring, and fast. The charm works. In just a minute, you’re not going to even be able to move.”

It...it can’t be true, can it?
She was tired. She felt exhausted. But that had to have been the long night and the longer day. Lina pulled the heavy blade from where it stuck, then lifted it up in guard. It felt like a bar of solid iron.

Oscar made to pull his cutlass from the planks of the cargo floor. It was stuck tight, though, lodged deeper than he’d meant to send it. He scowled and tried again. The sword barely budged.

The traitorous pirate wrapped his hand again around the hilt, glared at Lina, and then pulled up as he kicked down at the boards holding his blade. He kicked a second time and then a third, each blow a resounding knock that echoed throughout the cargo hold.

Finally, he yanked the blade free. Oscar snarled and raised it high, preparing to charge. Lina fought a wave of weariness, trying to anticipate Oscar’s blow.

Wooden splinters exploded into the air as the boards of the
Dawnhawk’
s hull erupted beneath Oscar Pleasant. They peppered Lina, as massive brass talons scythed up all about her startled foe. He screamed as they closed tight, catching him in a crushing grip that clipped his left arm neatly off. Oscar flailed and fought, swinging away ineffectively at the Dray Engine’s claws with his cutlass, spraying blood all about him from his horrible wound. Reflected daylight shone up through the holes past the talons, illuminating him in full for a brief, awful moment.

Then the Dray Engine pulled away. It ripped open a breach in the hull, and Oscar Pleasant disappeared like a cork popped free from a wine bottle. His screams dopplered up from outside the airship’s hull for a few moments, then went ominously silent. There was silence, and then a victorious mechanical roar sounded from just outside.

Allen shuffled again to his knees. “It’s on the hull!” he shouted, his voice raw. “That monster has got ahold of the—”

He collapsed with a cry of pain, one arm holding the other, which hung at an unnatural angle; obviously, it had been broken by Oscar. Lina snapped her jaw shut. She dropped the cutlass and raced over to him.

“Allen!” she said. “Hey, Allen, don’t worry, I’m here.”

“My arm,” he whimpered. “It’s broken. And my ankle’s sprained. He yanked me around for
ages
during the fight.”

“I know. Hey? It’s fine now.”

“Oh, what do you know about it?” snarled the young apprentice Mechanist. “You’re flailing around just like you pirates always do. You never think of consequences.” Lina jerked back in surprise, but he shook his head. “Never mind. We’ve got to cut that monster free before it brings the whole ship down. Using it was a
terrible
idea!”

Lina felt a twinge of irritation. She
had
come down here to help him, hadn’t she? And to kill Oscar, of course. Lina shook her head. They had bigger things to worry about. She bent to help Allen stand. He did so with a cry of pain, then took her shoulder in support.

As they hobbled back to the stair above, her eyes alighted on her old braid. She stared at it for a long moment, then shook her head. It was nothing. Just hair. Oscar never could have afforded the services of an aetherite. She put it out of her mind, helping Allen to skirt the hole in the floor, and the groaning, flailing Revenants.

Back up top, the fight with the Castaways was over. Bodies littered the deck, which was awash in blood that ran madly back and forth as the Dray Engine fought down below. Lina’s crewmates had won, it seemed. No one cheered, though. Everyone stood about in varying stages of shocked exhaustion. Natasha stood scowling amidships above the corpse of Morgan One-Eye, wrapping a rag around one bared, bloodied arm while a blood-spattered Butterbeak hunkered on her shoulder. Nearby, big Farouk knelt numbly over the corpse of his friend, Etarin. Young Paine hid behind the airship’s wheel, sobbing while Michael Hockton talked to him quietly. And up near the bow, her friend Andrea sat cradled in Ryan Gae’s lap.

Lina felt her heart catch in her chest. She wanted to go to them.
Oh no. Please. I’ve lost so many friends already.

“Where in the Realms Below did you run off to?” snapped Natasha. “I needed your blades up here!”

Lina blinked back at her, but Allen spoke first. “Oscar Pleasant is dead,” he shouted, half-panicked, his voice raw with pain. “And that’s not important! We’ve got to cut the monster loose, or it’ll tear us apart!”

“I know!” said Natasha. “The deck is pitching and yawing like mad. You’d think it would have fallen free by now.”

Lina shook her head. “It’s on the hull,” she said. “It’s got at least one claw gripping the hull.”

Natasha stared at them. Then she spat. “Of course it does. Cut it free, then. Anyone who can still move! I’m going to try to shake it loose. The rest of you, cut it free!”

The captain ran back down the deck for the helm while Allen pointed with his good arm at a thick clump of hawsers tied around the starboard gunwales. Lina helped him over as Farouk, Michael, Reaver Jane, and Rastalak all sprang wearily back to action.

She led Allen up near the cleat anchoring the thick bundle of rope that went over the side. Then she tried to draw a dagger that wasn’t there.
Damn it all.
A sword. She needed a sword, a dagger, or a boarding hatchet.

A Castaway’s corpse lay wedged up against the exhaust pipe a little farther up, the handles of two cutlasses poking out from beneath it. Lina ran there, rolled the corpse aside, and fetched them.

The Dray Engine roared out as she did so, heaving the
Dawnhawk
to one side. Lina threw herself across the exhaust pipe as the deck fell away and grabbed at the gunwales with her forearms, trying not to drop the blades clutched in her hands. The hollow pipe rang beneath her. Runt and her scrynlings went sliding past in their small crate while the little mother shrieked and spit and tried to stop it. Half straddling the boundary of her vessel, Lina looked out beyond the airship.

They’d come home. But things had changed in the short time they’d been gone. Haventown Lagoon lay dead ahead, a column of smoke rising thickly all about it. She spied warships in the water down past the curve of the cliff top, filling it almost completely. The Waterdocks writhed with the march of bluecoated soldiers filling its alleys. Popping muskets echoed throughout the lower township where pockets of fighting still occurred. The stair at Pillager’s Square between the Waterdocks and the Craftwright’s Terrace was besieged, and pirates and townsfolk were fighting from behind a makeshift barricade at its top against columns of soldiers trying to make the ascent. At their head marched the same brightly armored automatons they'd fought earlier today.

That wasn’t the strangest thing. Fully half of Haventown had...taken off. Nob, Flophouse, and the Yellow Lantern terraces all floated, like a string of vast, oversized airships—but rather than being hung from large gas bags, as airships were, the terraces were borne up from below on clusters of miniature gas bags and whirling propellers. Two massive hawsers at the edge of each platform connected them together, the last in the line attaching to the Craftwright’s Terrace, which still sat in its usual place against the cliff. At the pinnacle of the floating town clustered the battered and burned pirate airships, which had all pulled away from the fighting to flit around the Skydocks, at last now aptly named.

The twanging snap of overstressed cable rang out behind her. Lina glanced back to see one of the cables attaching the
Dawnhawk’
s
gondola to its gas bag go flying free, sending a shudder throughout the whole airship.

“Cut the monster free!” snarled Natasha back from the helm. “Hockton, port side! Jane, the bow! Ryan Gae, quit yer sobbing and join her! Paine, if you don’t move we’re all dead, but I swear I’ll throw you overboard myself before we go!” She threw the wheel hard to the right, then hard to the left, sending a violent shudder through the
Dawnhawk
.

It was true. The ship jerked again as the ancient Voornish war machine writhed from its hull. Lina swore to herself, shimmied back to the deck, and ran to the bundle of cables anchoring the Dray Engine to the airship. She dropped a blade near Allen, who snatched it up with his good hand and began to saw awkwardly away.

They worked quietly together for a moment. She pushed out the sounds of battle, the clanking mechanical struggles of the Dray Engine below, and the cries of her crewmates. Only then did she realize Allen was speaking.